Sydney Morning Herald

Grand challenges aren’t solved overnight, even by the brightest brains. Some, such as the web, need a first, rough draft before they reach their potential.

The “semantic web” is like the web on steroids, version 2.0 of the killer application that sent the internet mainstream and resulted in the greatest flow of information the world has known. It was envisaged by the web’s creator, British computer engineer and subsequent executive director of co-ordinating body the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Sir Tim Berners-Lee, to link systems no matter what they are, where they are or who owns them. As its name implies, the semantic web better defines resources so they sre found and used to automate tasks more easily, not just display information such as web pages for reading by humans.

Think of it as the “web for robots”.

Charles McCathieNeville, who, for the past six years worked at the W3C and on its advanced development of the semantic web, says this smarter web is as mature as the World Wide Web was when it went public in 1994.

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